A new trove of exhibits unearthed as part of Dominion’s defamation
lawsuit against Fox News was released on Tuesday, including emails, text
messages and transcripts from depositions by numerous Fox News
personalities and executives.

There are lots of interesting details in the documents that reinforce
the allegations made in Dominion’s recent motion for summary judgment.
But the main takeaways are:

1. Most corners of Fox News — from reporters and producers to primetime
hosts to the most senior executives — knew that the claims of
widespread fraud in the 2020 election put forward by DONALD TRUMP,
his lawyers and their political allies were bogus. 
2. Despite this, Fox News executives and primetime hosts leaned into
the election conspiracy theories after they realized their
Trump-loving viewers were abandoning the network for more right-wing
alternatives.
3. The news and opinion divisions at Fox News, never great allies even
in less stressful times, went to war with each other in the
post-election period. 
4. TUCKER CARLSON hates Trump.

And Speaker Kevin McCarthy's decision to fork over Jan. 6 footage to
Carlson  continued to reverberate around Capitol Hill yesterday
following the Fox host’s first big dispatch, which drew prominent
rebukes from Democrats and Republicans. It was “a headache of [House
Republicans’] own making,” write Sarah Ferris, Olivia Beavers and Kyle
Cheney, one that “reopened a painful fault line that his party has
repeatedly tried to mend.”

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Raghu Manavalan is the host and senior editor of POLITICO's Playbook
Daily Briefing.
Jenny Ament is the executive producer of POLITICO Audio.